October 16, 2019 • Farm

The Fall is our favorite time of year next to Spring.

When the sun is out the colours of the trees just explode with beauty.  The nights are cool, and the bug population (specifically the mosquitos) are mostly gone, and we begin to really enjoy a nice harvest meal every day.


In spite of all the rain we’ve gotten over the past month, Mike has been busy harvesting and processing veggies from the garden.  We’ve been pleased with our crops this year considering how little we really payed attention to them this summer, and with how little rain we got.  Especially good this year were the Cayenne peppers as well as all the other varieties of hot peppers Mike grew.  Tomatoes, Kale and a bumper crop of Butternut squash! Yum!

While Mike and I were happy with how this year went we look forward to stepping it up a notch next year.  We have some plans to put up some greenhouse structures and build another glass house with re-used windows.  We’ll see how it all pans out, but either way we are excited and hopeful for the 2020 gardening season.

Our sugar bush has a serious case of webworm infestation.  On top of having the tent caterpillars this year, these webworms have been living with us for a couple of years now and will likely be around next season too.  They come out early in the spring and had a second round early in the fall  Unfortunately on such a large scale all we can really do is wait for natural predators to fly in and do a number on the worm population until they inevitably crash.  Here’s hoping we get the birds we need in the coming spring to make a difference.  Webworms are defoliators and while they don’t defoliate the trees as severely as the tent caterpillars they still stress the trees out.  We’ll be keeping an eye on this situation in any case, since on top of being a stressor to the trees it causes showers of frass to fall all over our deck, cars and yard for what seems like weeks at a time… yuck.

Stay tuned for some great recipes (I know I keep saying this, lol), but I am hopeful that they will be posted in the coming week.  We are so thankful to everyone to supports us and we need to share these great recipes with our community.  So hang in there and we’ll get our ingredients together!

Until our next update in the winter, enjoy this beautiful season before the snow flys (unless it’s already flying, in which case we don’t envy you at present but we know it’s heading our way eventually too).

-J&M

Quality over Quantity at Garside Gardens.